


Distant, Sweet, and in the Marrow

by orphan_account



Category: Tennis RPF
Genre: Angst, M/M, Pining, sad aspiring sugar daddy roger federer, so much fucking angst, world's most oblivious boy rafael nadal parera, you can blame The Academy for that!!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-27
Updated: 2021-01-27
Packaged: 2021-03-13 13:07:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,799
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29029191
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: So Roger drifts half-embalmed in a glass-and-marble crypt of his own making. He remembers being a conqueror and lives conquered by just about everything surrounding him. Then Rafa crashes into his tomb like a fallen star.…………………a Roger POV from Posidonia's masterpiece, The Academy
Relationships: Roger Federer/Rafael Nadal
Comments: 5
Kudos: 13





	Distant, Sweet, and in the Marrow

**Author's Note:**

  * For [](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts).



> good lord i can't believe i'm publishing tennis rpf fic, but i just fucking can't with these two. thank you to the impossibly talented Posidonia for driving me to this sin. they rly created a new fedal blueprint with their versions of these two and i am simply far too invested in miserable, pining roger federer and young, gorgeous, and confused rafael nadal to let them go.
> 
> this is 100% my personal interpretation of What Is Going On Inside Roger's Head. it's absolutely not canon to the actual fic, and if anything interferes or ends up interfering with the fic itself, just consider this a lil AU of an AU
> 
> this will make no sense if you haven't read their fic The Academy so uhh, go do that if you haven't? it's a masterpiece. i cannot praise it enough. 
> 
> title is from Federico Garcia Lorca's "The Poet Speaks with Love on the Telephone". it's a gorgeous poem, as are all his poems. i highly recommend reading some! 
> 
> and if by some chance anyone who reads this is subscribed to me from my other fandom;; i'm so fucking sorry i did not expect my life to be colonized by Gay Tennis™ to this extent

The thing is, Roger hadn't minded being half alive. He's been mostly dead for so long. Survival is a sour cup to sip from when he's already been euphoric and immortal, but he drinks it nonetheless. He had existed in his own private stratosphere and quite literally fallen to earth, his wings of luck crippled by the sun of his impossible achievement. Now he survives out of muted resentment—to spite the expectation that he must be grateful that he'd been allowed to crawl, shattered and useless, to an eternally grey After. Effort is necessary for survival, and Roger has exerted himself just enough to putter along listlessly in defiance of the assumption that he must try. He hadn't fought, hadn't been responsible for beating back the odds. He had lain in a bed while doctors turned his once brilliant body into a Frankenstein's monster of what he had spent his whole life working for, and has managed not to fucking kill himself in the aftermath. What a fucking survivor he is. Absolutely inspirational. 

It would be embarrassing to try to be anything more. Roger uses it as a blanket excuse for not bothering to work necromancy on what fragments of his old life remain. He's older than his years and every person he encounters can smell misery on him; _Eau de Tragédie._ And the idea of the pitying encouragement that would greet his efforts to find a New Purpose is enough to make Roger wish he truly were dead. The notion that he would have been better off has been so deeply embedded within him he doesn't even know if he's capable of exorcising it again. It’s not that Roger is suicidal—he doesn’t have it in him to seriously contemplate how he would even go about it—but the mornings where he wishes that by some miracle he just hadn’t opened his eyes have crept into his blood. 

So he drifts half-embalmed in a glass-and-marble crypt of his own making. He remembers being a conqueror and lives conquered by just about everything surrounding him. Then Rafa crashes into his tomb like a fallen star, and Roger has at last found his new purpose—to be tormented with ceaseless, burning want for something other than what he'd once had. 

He doesn't quite register Rafa as more than young, Mediterranean, and good looking upon their first meeting. In all probability, if Rafa had flashed that smile through the chocolate milk, it would have happened then and there. Sure, Roger probably already has one foot in the door, but he's not quite free-falling yet. 

It does happen the next time. 

He first registers a glossy head atop a pair of shoulders so muscled he would have envied them even when his own body was a finely-tuned instrument. The head is watching his children and Novak, who's showboating as usual. Roger hovers behind, wondering if Rafa knows he’s there, if he’s obligated to speak first. Would silence be rude? He often comes up short answering these sorts of questions these days. 

"They play well, your sons," Rafa says, the 's' exotically lisped. 

Then Roger gets to really look at him. He talks about Roger’s children, about his own family, as though he has already reached the natural assumption that Roger might like to discuss these things with him. No one really talks to Roger about anything other than Roger when he first meets them. He listens to English that sounds a bit like he feels; haphazardly glued into a mirage of wholeness. He sees Rafa’s teeth through vision that is tunneling, white and almost too big in his face. His dimples flash like secrets through the muscles of his cheeks. Roger sees the moment when he recognizes this familiarity is not the default setting he should be in around Roger Federer, and he goes reverent and reticent. Roger desperately wishes he had the key to unlock what he has just caught a glimpse of. 

After that, Rafa is everywhere. Rafa is not there nearly enough. Rafa seeps into the fissures Roger's tried and failed to fill. Rafa does not fill them as much as Roger needs him to. Rafa is skittish as a deer, and yet oddly able to find blood stirring dark and slow beneath Roger's countless old wounds and poke at them with gentle, unbearable curiosity. 

"Please don't go in there again," Roger says when he finds him, coiled with the temporarily soothed agitation of a snake before its charmer, staring at one of many relics Roger himself can't bear to look at even glancingly. His fingers are shockingly brown against the white of the sheet. Roger should be angry. He isn't, and he's unsure what he feels instead. Maybe he wishes Rafa had been the sort to reach out and touch. It would have been right, somehow, for him to leave fingerprints, some small map of melancholy behind the edifice of Rafa's panic-fueled professionalism, forever wedded to one of many eulogies to the man Roger had been. 

…………………………………

It should reassure him that Rafa has everyone, even Mirka, reluctantly bewitched. Novak bestows upon him lazy camaraderie; a carelessly slung arm, a mowing of fingers through dark hair; hubristic, casual touches that Roger envies beyond words. He simply can't imagine assuming his touch would be welcome. Rafa's unruly young charges are said to not only respect him despite his youth but like him. According to Mirka he exists expertly in the mythical twilight between authority and friend, boy and man. The girls like him. The boys like him. Jelena likes him. 

Roger likes him. He also believes, irrationally, that it's his duty to like Rafa, to notice him, to bestow upon him what power Roger's regard still holds and…and what, befriend him? Talk to him? Help him? Some part of him knows that all three of these things still wouldn't be enough. He didn't win four fucking Wimbledons by not being greedy. But to put an effort into becoming more than an employer to this radiant, impenetrable boy would be beyond embarrassment. Lord, does Roger still try. 

"Really, you only have one racquet?" says Roger. He could hit himself for successfully managing to seem elitist in addition to awkward and nosy in a one-minute conversation. Thankfully he doesn't manage to shatter what delicate connection they—he—has achieved. 

He has Rafa’s racquet, weathered by sweat, clay and callus. It’s in his hand and it’s the blueprint of Rafa’s life, of every action and inaction that led him to be standing here before Roger, bashful and wary. And Roger has no choice but to let it slip away. To have it here in his hand and to let it go are fundamentally incompatible concepts. Somehow, Roger manages. There are no rational explanations for how he wants to cling to any vestige of this breathing beacon of light, and certainly none he can offer to Rafa. 

There's no one to ask when Roger gets the idea to send the racquets. He knows this is pathetic, this desire to buy his way into Rafa’s thoughts if he can't earn it through his horribly rusted social skills. He doesn't know what he has to offer except his knowledge of tennis and his money. The racquets are practical enough that he hopes Rafa will accept them. Roger can see him rejecting them on principle or even feeling cheapened by an implication Roger hopes doesn't occur to him. He tells himself that no such implication is there. He’s known these kinds of men, who drape their young, reluctant lovers in all manner of luxury in return for a kiss, a night, a lifetime. Roger would like to think he isn’t that kind of man, but he is wealthy, famous, and miserable. Maybe some part of him isn’t above—but no, he couldn’t stand the idea of coercing someone so alive into an arrangement that would inevitably leave them both wealthy and miserable. 

But if there was a chance Rafa might be interested, a scrap of evidence—well. Roger might hate the idea, but he has a nasty suspicion he would absolutely settle for it just to bask in the hearth of all that sun-soaked, disillusioned, young, _young_ potential. 

He sends the racquets. He hopes Rafa realizes they're from him. He hopes Rafa never realizes they're from him. He wonders how many is enough to overwhelm without sending him straight into assuming he's being stalked. He fucking hopes he never sees Novak playing with one. 

He tries to imagine that Rafa will smile when he sees them. He tries to convince himself that when Rafa first runs his hand down an overgrip, it will be a touch bestowed upon Roger by proxy. He’s opened his palms against a sheet of glass, and through this he can almost believe Rafa has pressed back, so close and so far away. 

…………………………………………

There must be some way to lure Rafa into providing his company without resorting to his authority as employer, but if there is such a method Roger hasn't discovered it. He has one key to Rafa's presence—if Rafa feels he is being granted a privilege, he believes it is impolite to refuse it. The problem is that Roger has no idea what to do with Rafa once he is there, no way of stripping him of his stiff, second-language efforts to evade some implicit consequence for familiarity. It is Rafa who occasionally deigns to bloom into unexpected candor, with Roger as an accidental witness, grasping greedily at these outbursts even as they curl away from his waiting fingers. 

"He need to learn to be happier for this friend. Is no sporting to act like that, you know, as if the universe, it always supposed to give the win to you and not your friend," says Rafa righteously at nearly three in the morning, and it's this kind of statement that would invoke an eye-roll, maybe even a rebuttal on principle, were it made by Novak. But Rafa has an odd magic over simple statements, turning unwary clichés into wells of unexpected profundity. 

Roger never knows what to say or do in these moments, terrified of disrupting the filigree of moments he has curated for Rafa to be comfortable expressing an opinion. It would be easier if he didn't still want to push further, to see just how far he can get. He didn't become the best tennis player in the world by being comfortable with what he'd already achieved. 

Roger doesn't do enough, of course. He stands, aware of how his body aches, how the cold fucking poisons him, while Rafa thanks him for dinner with his lips and for the racquets with his eyes. He's stiff and freezing through the soles of his slippers and the flimsy cocoon of his bathrobe, and Rafa is the ultimate taunt, plainly hot-blooded and insouciantly loose-limbed. If Roger touched him he'd feel so fucking alive. 

He likes to think he knows pain better than the average person. The pain of standing in his own kitchen, impotent in the wake of this boy whom he can't help but picture at his table, in his arms, in his life, is surprisingly comparable to waking in a hospital with everything he had worked for his whole fucking life irrevocably shattered. 

Had there been signs that this reckoning was coming? He had gone through all the motions; a wife, children, a future to cling to even after being broken from forty-love, so to speak. It was easy to use the many wastelands of his life as bandages for a void Roger has never addressed. He'd smothered it in tragedy, away from light and love, and it had inevitably festered, waiting for someone like Rafa to rip back all those layers of denial. And now it’s happened, and he still can’t fucking work up the courage to think about what it means. He's been left stripped and openly bleeding, sans all his old tourniquets. Rafa doesn’t notice. 

It's better that he doesn't notice. Rafa doesn't need to feel guilty for not returning the attentions of a covetous, crippled man far past his glory days. He shouldn't have to bear the weight of them at all, even unknowingly. How selfish Roger must be to think he has a right to wreathe this boy, who is clear water and salt and summer sky, in the leaves of his waning autumn. 

"I have tried this arrangement, and I simply do not feel comfortable keeping it," he says, and means _he won't read my mind and look for me, look at me, feel me, let me hold his racquet again, tell me everything about himself, put his hands on trophies I haven't been able to face for years, touch me—_

"I've made myself clear," he says, and means, _I will ruin him if I keep him here._

………………………

He realizes, on some level, that he has made a mistake. He'd counted on Rafa not knowing why Roger couldn't stand to share a house with him, but it hadn't occurred to him that Rafa would jump to the obvious conclusion that Roger was repelled by him, saw himself as above Rafa. 

And he misses watching Rafa, searching for small clues that Rafa lives in the same space as him, has suffused surfaces of Roger’s home with his touch. His absence is purgatory. 

The next time he really has a chance to watch him Rafa's hair has been cut. It suits him, makes him resemble a roguishly mussed teen idol more than a feral young pirate. Roger still misses the pirate. The ornamentally muscled body and aching youth of his face had been perfectly at odds with clothes that didn't quite fit his shoulders, the hair that needed constant brushing from the sultry angles of his eyes. 

Roger is aware, of course, that these are absurd opinions to have about a man over a decade younger than him who is currently wearing a pink boa and dancing tipsily and (hopefully) reluctantly to “La Bamba” with Novak fucking Djokovic. But how can he help it? Even the rhinestone crown, indiscernible from similar models owned by the girls, has no power over the sensual world that powerful, awkward body creates. Rafa is so obviously a study in contrasts; soft edges of the baby-faced, anxious boy at odds with a man who manages authority through the palpability of his world-weariness. Here he is equally discordant, the color of a ripened peach and equally lush, arms jerking awkwardly even as his hips shimmer back and forth, fluid even under the sedation of Rafa’s obvious resentment. The sulky curve of his mouth is devastating. Roger is drunk on looking at him. He wants to talk to him. He wants to bite him. 

He might tell himself that it's the desire to offer an explanation Rafa deserves that leads Roger to trapping him among the frippery of the daybed, the night holding its breath all around them. In reality he just wants to be alone with Rafa, the deck a readymade bubble of intimacy Roger lacks the dexterity to create organically. 

What does he expect to have happen? To apologize, to explain, to achieve some kind of real connection. To be enfolded in Rafa's genuine approval would be the most luxurious thing. He certainly doesn't expect Rafa to turn the snow globe Roger had hoped to trap them within—a glittery capsule of sound and color to preserve him, impossibly luminous star in a sky soon to be obliterated by celebration, for Roger’s gaze—into the unbearable heat of being seen. 

"Would you be happier, señor, if you were somewhere else too?" 

People look at Roger and try not to see him. They have good reason; Roger can't blame the world for not wanting to look at something once rare and wonderful now reduced to atrophy and apathy. Maybe Rafa has a knack for it because he's the first to penetrate the rot that had colonized Roger body and soul. He is stripped clean now, sweating under the spotlight of Rafa's dark, dark eyes. 

"Where is your evidence, you no giving up living yet?" says Rafa, righteous in his mission to wring from Roger these most painful truths. 

Where is the evidence? It's in his dreams, the uneasy sweat he wakes with, the awareness that Rafa’s breath is infusing his home, keeping Roger submerged in some small part of him. It's in the hours he spent poring over how many racquets to send a boy he barely knows It's in his lips in more ways than one. None of these things are sayable, are demonstrable. 

"Rogelio," says Rafa, and Roger loses his mind, the only logical explanation for what he does. 

The only thing he realizes through the sound of his own blood in his ears, which seems to have doubled in volume and swelled up in every single one of his veins, is that he's scaring Rafa. It cuts through the forgotten urge to prove, to claim. The deterioration of the impulses of a winner, as decayed as his other muscles, is the only thing that allows Roger to release him from the cloud of mint and lime Rafa's breath has steamed up around them. Roger tries to stay suspended in it even as it dissolves, a cytoplasm he's convinced he can't maintain the basic functions of his body without. His hands feel branded for having touched him, to have tasted Rafa's breath and seen the dilation of his eyes. He'd been close enough to nearly feel his heart, jackrabbiting under Roger's brute strength, had been close enough to kiss. 

He stays there in the cold and dark long after Rafa leaves, watching what contours of the finale remain draped over the stars, each a filmy stamp of smoke and gunpowder-smell. At last even those have faded into a black as irreversible as spilled ink, giving no indication the sky had ever been wakened into explosive light. 

……………………………………

Rafa is twenty-two and carries himself with a woundedness beyond his years, weathered by some concealed tragedy. He's so incredibly young, the age when Roger himself had been an arrogant young prince who'd finally inherited his kingdom. He can't remember being half so observant as Rafa obviously is to have so expertly pinpointed within their fragmented conversations all the places Roger has incorrectly pieced himself back together. Roger had had no reason to. What was there to look for beyond the glittering battlements of his own castle? There had been no need to learn reciprocity when the powdered, perfumed hordes were forever clustered around him, waiting for some behavior of interest like zoo-goers, and had bled dry whatever spectacle Roger offered. 

He wants to give Rafa everything that Rafa will accept. The world, if he could. Roger finally understands the cliché of fetching the moon itself if one's lover wished it (lover, a corner of him whispers, and sighs). There isn't much Rafa will accept; the panther-sleek glamor of the car certainly has little impact. Rafa sits in watchful silence, thundercloud of speculation hanging over his head. He's less ashen, at least, whatever illusion he saw at the lake fading as he catalogs the shape of trees rising jaggedly from the dark, tombstone-like beyond the car window. It’s morbidly fitting; if the Dolomites are the graveyard of his career, this is the graveyard of his spirit. Or maybe it’s just plain fucking hell, Rafa placed before him as a constant reminder of what his self-damnation has wrought. Roger can't give much of a shit about whatever Scooby Doo nonsense is happening at the lake when the contemplative curve of Rafa's cheek is tilted away from him, faintly limned by what moonlight can penetrate the maw of the car. 

Attempting to converse with him makes Roger feel like a senile old man humored by a young relative on an obligatory visit, always aware of his visitor seeking escape. Roger doesn't know how to get more out of him, a lumbering beast fruitlessly trying to coax a mistreated animal into eating from his palm. Rafa will not greedily swallow what that old coterie, not half so luminous for all their gleaming ornaments of stature, had devoured. And Roger no longer has any real social skills to offer, can only clumsily lure with status and wealth. 

He offers Rafa Wimbledon, as best he can. Inadvertently, he offers him Andy Murray too. 

…………………………………

He doesn't expect to see Rafa so soon after his return from misty moors or whatever the fuck kinds of landscapes people enjoy in Scotland. Roger certainly doesn't expect to find him looking so completely wrecked. 

What does he do? Rafa is still tragically, devastatingly lovely. 

"What's wrong?" he asks. 

He wishes he could approach Rafa delicately, as he would seek to observe at close range a rare and easily startled bird. 

He tries. He’s clunky and misshapen, but he tries. One step at a time, small enough to barely be noticeable, hoping against all hope Rafa won't scatter, feathers ruffled, into the blinding sky. There is a moment, using Rafa as his mirror, when Roger thinks he might be able to convey all that consumes him through some osmosis of mutual misery. He wonders if it is possible that Rafa will look to him and ask him for the comfort Roger so desperately wants to give. 

"Señor," Rafa will say, that fat lower lip teetering on the edge of watershed, "please—" 

He will be unable to finish and Roger will go to him, understanding exactly what he needs anyway. He'll sit beside Rafa, close enough to feel the conduction of heat between their touching legs, and Rafa will lean into him. Roger knows this, at least, he can do. He's experienced all the wrong ways to be comforted, and Rafa will realize this and not only allow, but take solace in Roger's arm around his shoulder. He will tilt his beautiful, sunkissed face into Roger's neck and baptize him with his tears, and Roger will absorb as much of his pain as he can. He wants to take it from him, to let him feel that Roger, at least, aches for him. He wants to bundle him in whatever tenderness Rafa will accept and keep him there. He wonders if there’s any world in which he might get away with leaving a stray kiss in Rafa’s hair. 

He doesn't know how to proceed. He is certain that if he sits, Rafa will flee. Roger tries speaking instead. 

"Rafa—" he tries, willing it with all his might, and reaches out a hand wracked with painfully obvious anticipation. 

"No me toques!" Rafa screams and that's it. 

He doesn't know what exactly flashes on his face, but whatever it is pushes Rafa even deeper into despair. When Rafa is out of sight and hearing range, Roger thinks that in a way he partially succeeded—while he didn't manage to ease the burden of Rafa's pain, he has certainly managed to have absorbed it into himself. His still-healthy lungs, which before had been ballooned with hope, feel like they have collapsed entirely. 

……………………………………

He can recognize Rafa at a greater distance than he can anyone else, including his own wife, even with the powerful curve of his back neutered by how he's hunched, true to his generation, over his phone. His shirt is partially tucked, apparently by accident, into the waistband of his shorts. Roger thinks about the line he'd find if he pulled that elastic down just an inch, the contrast between skin that's spent years under Mediterranean sunshine and the scraps of it that were secreted away under a rotation of neon shorts, like the border between the Atlantic and Pacific where the waters refuse to mingle; green and blue in eternal stalemate.

There is something appropriate in relying on an external motor to keep pace with the Rafa, whose sleek leg muscles visibly bunch and expand with every step, like an awkward cyborg. Roger wonders whom he's texting. The only option that doesn't leave the bottom dropping out of his stomach is family or one of his boys. These are, of course, not the only likely ones. There's fucking Novak, likely texting him about how he's destroying his body with gluten or some other such bullshit, and there's the potential for some equally gorgeous young thing he left in Manacor, waiting patiently for his return. Someone like Maria Francesca whatever-her-name-is, who looks escaped from a Goya painting with her bottomless, melancholic Spanish eyes. 

There is far, far too much potential for it to be Andy Fucking Murray, with whom Rafa has recently been sequestered cozily in a fucking cottage, and for whom he is pining as obviously as Roger pines for him. Andy Fucking Murray, one of the only people in the world who has access to what Roger himself does have to offer. Only for Roger, it's just memory, snapshots he ought to have learned to let go of that he can't help but shove under Rafa's nose, hoping one of them will spark something in him. Andy is living it, wants Rafa to live it with him. Rafa hasn't accepted or refused. 

His heart has started beating far too quickly, slamming in his chest as though self-flagellating. He has to try something different, but Lord knows Roger has absolutely no clue what. 

Most people like talking about themselves. 

"I heard you made it to a few finals with your boys," he tries, hoping, praying that this will elicit the normal response—a bloom of pride that Roger will encourage into flowering, and then perhaps a discussion of his efforts at mentor-hood, which Roger will validate. Maybe he'll finally learn what led Rafa into such a role so young in the first place. Everything about him radiates that he was—is—meant for something more than coaxing lazy, impertinent teenagers into achieving some portion of their potential. In an alternate timeline, Roger is certain he could have wrung brilliance from Rafa, who has the work-ethic of man of half his talent. And he must be talented, to have beaten the future World-Fucking-Number-One multiple times in their shared youth. 

Dwelling on what-ifs isn't going to be fruitful here, though. He'd already given it a go with little result. Rafa grunts. Roger tries again. 

"No, that really is something, congratulations.”

Had someone told him last year that silence, his longtime refuge, could ever be so unbearable, he would have laughed at them. It rises between them now like the column of air between two opposing magnets. Impenetrable. Roger knows enough to realize that speaking again after such a lack of response is a faux pas, has no means of penetrating that wall other than a sad attempt at telepathy. _Look at me, _he thinks, lasering all of his energy into it, _please, please look at me. I'll leave you alone if you only look once, just once, come on Rafa, that's not too much, you don't even know what you could do for me if you just fucking talked to me for two minutes, I know that's not too much, come on…___

__He just wants one hint of what they'd had on his deck beneath star-blotting sprays of light and sound, an ambience he has no means of conjuring anew._ _

__He snaps._ _

__"You know, you really are impossible. Just fucking impossible."_ _

__What cruel irony it is that this is what it takes to finally be the focus of Rafa's undivided attention; to wound him directly, when all Roger wants to fucking do is make him happy._ _

__……………………………_ _

__Armed with Rafa's number at last, a direct path Roger feels like he’s spent years blundering in search of, is instead a labyrinth he has no means of navigating. He has to apologize, to reconcile ( _Reconcile?_ a nasty corner of his brain whispers. There had been no reciprocated warmth to begin with), and this should be so fucking simple, all he has to do is type, but God, it isn't, it really, really isn't. _ _

__How do people Rafa's age even text? He envisions himself trying to use an emoji that conveys his repentance, googling whatever hieroglyphic abbreviations Rafa’s generation use, and physically shudders with embarrassment. He'll type as he does normally. Rafa will certainly be repelled by whatever efforts Roger might make towards seeming less pathetic._ _

__His thumb shivers on the precipice until he forces it to descend upon the 'h'. There is the overwhelming sensation of stepping off the edge of a great height. Freefall. He can barely type through the vertigo. Roger presses send. Presses his phone gently into his pocket, where he'll not only hear but feel it vibrate._ _

__He keeps breathing. He prays Rafa won’t let him plummet to the rocks. And he waits._ _

**Author's Note:**

> thank you again to Posidonia for just being a fucking icon of fedal. good lord, everything they touch is gold. if you want some top tier fedal go read everything they've written.  
> and thank you to anyone who reads this!! pls lmk what you think, as this is my first venture into the thorny world of rpf, and i be hella nervous. i'm incredibly grateful to anyone who takes the time to read. stay safe and sane y'all!!


End file.
